Synodal Fallout: Putting Light Under Bushel Baskets

"The Church’s traditional firmament of piety and devotion is replaced by political fervor, and humble submission to the will of God collapses before a careful attention to the Self."

From Crisis

By Fr John A. Perricone, PhD

Where Christ once declared victory in the red blood of His Cross, the Synodalists bleat in the pastels of accommodation.

Lower the Vexilla Regis. Raise the white of flag of surrender. The Synodal Church has arrived.

Where Christ once declared victory in the red blood of His Cross, the Synodalists bleat in the pastels of accommodation. Their white flag was a shameless admission that the Church of 2024 no longer has anything to say. Of course, much was said.  And said. And said again. But it was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 17).

Sad that the whole world should witness the once mighty Roman Church reduce itself to such self-parody. Rather like a grown man reverting back to thumb-sucking. The Synodalists were engaged in the serious business of reducing the Church to irrelevance. Inured by decades of such failed rapprochement with the pieties of the age, most Catholics stopped listening decades ago.  

Proof abounds. Diocese after diocese is announcing the closure and mergers of more churches. They correctly announce that Catholics are no longer coming. One wonders if for one fleeting moment they might consider that vapid religious education and impotent liturgies for sixty years might have something to do with it. Apparently not. So, the dance with irrelevance continues.

Still, enough Catholics are content to applaud this waltz with insignificance. It is, after all, a no-fault Catholicism where one can have one’s cake and eat it too. Enough high-ranking prelates protect it as though it were the sancta sanctorum, happy to deepen the paralysis of an already paralyzed church. These are men who prize process over certitude, the bien pensant over truth, diversity over excellence, and the zeitgeist over tradition.

The roots of this paralysis run deep, stretching back to the early twentieth century. Then, a wildly popular Sorbonne professor named Henri Bergson thought he was toppling the idols of a sterile scientism with his free spirited “intuition.” So alluring was this untethered “intuition” that it even captured the intellectually-starved Raissa and Jacques Maritain, until they discovered the richly oxygenated air of St. Thomas Aquinas. Other Catholics were not so fortunate. 

Blondel’s L’Action and Pierre Rousselot’s L’intellectualisme de Saint Thomas pushed more strenuously the assault on truth, seeing it as insulting, with its strutting as something quite definite and propositional. In Blondel’s world, truth was a straitjacket to the élan vital of “action.” Rousselot proposed that the Church’s doctrinal expression of sacred revelation was stifling and should yield to the fresh formulations of each age. These are not to be cast aside as figures of an inconsequential academic debate. They are the tendons upon which was fashioned the leviathan being experienced today.

For the Synodalist, the call to sanctity is displaced by the call to action. (Historical footnote: this was the name of a de rigueur experiment of the late 1970s, eventually cast into the landfill of failed experiments.) The Church’s traditional firmament of piety and devotion is replaced by political fervor, and humble submission to the will of God collapses before a careful attention to the Self.
Relativism reigns supreme. The Synodalist’s functioning rubric casts the whole of the Church’s doctrinal and spiritual tradition aside as outdated and harmful. The recent purges of the Traditional Mass are proof of their zealotry. Its increasing ferocity only proves how much of a mortal danger it is to their project. Just as the Jacobins erased history with the adoption of a new calendar, so the Synodalist’s earnest desire to have the Church’s beginning be 1965. The problem with relativism is that in due course today’s relativism falls victim to relativism. When truth disappears, so does the steadiness of any position. Even false ones. All are eventually cast into the devouring fires of the Relativist Moloch.

In the Synodalist world, justice must bow to an all-devouring authoritarianism. It is always amusing to watch men who detest authority wield it so lustily. With the abandonment of truth, its gentle sway is no longer an incentive—only the sheer exercise of power. Nietzsche recognized this with unflinching candor. So did Machiavelli. In both instances, men must be compelled to conform, whether by the lash of The Prince or of the Übermensch. Rousseau put it succinctly in The Social Contract: “Sometimes men must be forced to be free.” 

Contrast this with the elegant formulation of the great Dominican Thomist Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: 

The Church is intolerant in principle, because she believes; but is tolerant in practice, because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle, because they do not believe; but are intolerant in practice because they do not love.  

Pure Thomistic genius: balanced and piercing.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the Synodalists’ methods are arbitrary and crushing. Since they have long left the bright uplands of virtue and doctrine, their weapons leave behind the delicacy of those instruments which once were the arsenal of Mother Church. Interesting that this attribution for the Church has long been abandoned by the Catholic Left. They passionately argue that it is the paternalism of a dead past. Closer to the truth, it is one of the most ancient terms for the Church, beginning with St. Cyprian in the third century: “no one can have God as their Father, who does not have the Church as their mother.” 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church elaborates: 

It is in the Church, in communion with all the baptized, that the Christian fulfills his vocation. From the Church he receives the Word of God containing the teachings of “the law of Christ.” From the Church he receives the grace of the sacraments that sustains him on the “way.” From the Church he learns the example of holiness and recognizes its model and source in the all-holy Virgin Mary; he discerns it in the authentic witness of those who live it; he discovers it in the spiritual tradition and long history of the saints who have gone before him and whom the liturgy celebrates in the rhythms of the sanctoral cycle. (2030)

Yes, even justice frays beneath the yolk of the Synodalist. Yes, they drone on about peace and justice, but always there lurks behind their high dudgeon Orwell’s devastating words in Animal Farm: “All pigs are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Oh yes, the Synodalist’s white flag. It is raised aloft to signal to the World that it has won. It is a self-flagellation, a mea culpa for two thousand years of offensive doctrinal rigidity. The highest churchmen are waving that flag with statements insisting that all religions are paths to God. Or the Synodal bishop at one of the many press conferences, who pontificated, “we have much to learn from other religions.” Only a few days ago, a prominent Jesuit at the Synod posted a picture of two women, with the caption: “For All Soul’s Day: How a Catholic woman’s faith provided comfort after the loss of her wife.”  

What Synodal ingenuity. Using an ancient solemn feast of the Church to undermine the Church’s ancient Faith.

Alas, the white flags. Recall where Dante placed cowards in the Divine Comedy: at the very gate of Hell’s entrance—neither in Hell nor in Heaven because their cowardice makes them repulsive to both the saved and the damned. They are consigned to run incessantly, waving white flags.

If that doesn’t make the Synodalist’s skin crawl, maybe God’s words might; “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house” (Matthew 5:15).

Or, if that doesn’t do, perhaps this: “but whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

Take comfort, “little ones.” God’s justice grinds slowly, but it grinds.